In this post I will demonstrate the use of ‘Program To Interface’ Design Principle and Object Composition, to emulate Multiple Inheritance in Java. For a refresher on these topics, there’s a very informative post on Artima Developer where Erich Gamma, co-author of the landmark book, Design Patterns, talks with Bill Venners about two design principles: program to an interface, not an implementation, and favor object composition over class inheritance.

For our example, consider different type of Employment Roles available in a typical Software Consulting Firm. To simplify things a bit, assume there are 4 roles; Developer, Tester, Architect and Project Manager. All of these are Employee(s) of the Software Consulting Form i.e. the employer.